5 Benefits of Utilizing a Single Sign-on Service

5 Benefits of Utilizing a Single Sign-on Service

In business, your success is measured by your employees’ abilities to work fast and efficiently in an ever-evolving marketplace. But when you throw security policies into the mix and try to reduce the chances of an attacker focusing on your infrastructure, things get complicated. There has to be a better way to protect your valuable data while improving your company’s security posture, right? Enter single sign-on (SSO) technology!

Benefit #1: Accessibility

Single sign-on technologies are security controls designed to help employees move through company resources with ease. Rather than creating a new account and sorting out their permissions with a system administrator, employees are granted temporary access with an authorization mechanism, such as a token or cookie.

And if you think about it, this makes sense: imagine how time-consuming it would be to create a new account for every resource you accessed. By the time you were ready to work, the day would be over! With SSO, once you sign in and authenticate once, you’re good to go.

Benefit #2: Uses Complex Authentication

In the realm of security, businesses live and die by their authentication policies. Without complex passwords, multi-factor authentication and essential checks and sums in place, the entire infrastructure would become compromised.

When using SSO technologies, employees must create complex passwords that are longer than eight digits, use upper and lower case, incorporate numbers and use special characters. While this may seem overwhelming to employees, it enforces good security practices with their password creation that will extend into other areas of their work. For business owners and entrepreneurs, this is a huge benefit.

Benefit #3: Shadow IT Elimination

A topic that many people are unfamiliar with is the risk of shadow IT within an organization. Shadow IT is a term used for employees who go beyond their permissions to implement technology that could hurt the business.

And while this is often a non-malicious attempt to make their lives easier, it usually causes more harm than good. To demonstrate shadow IT more precisely, consider the following scenario: John Doe may only access company servers from 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday. Knowing he has a large project due in a few weeks, John Doe writes a backdoor into the development server under an anonymous username so he can work from home.

Months down the road, a data breach occurs when an attacker discovers John’s backdoor that he created months before and uses it to compromise the development server. If the company used SSO technology, John’s activity would’ve linked to the certificate or cookie generated by SSO software, and his managers would’ve noticed the attack vector before exploitation occurred.

Benefit #4: Reduces Attack Vectors

For hackers, the more opportunities they have to compromise your systems, the better. With SSO software, employees can log in at the beginning of their day and work until it’s time to clock out.

When using other methods of authentication, it forces employees to create multiple passwords, usernames and credentials. If your employees are creating credentials for every technology platform they use, eventually they’ll generate a password that hackers can easily crack. By reducing the number of valid credentials that can be used to access your resources, you reduce the odds of being compromised.

Benefit #5: Production

Let’s face it: you’re a business owner who wants their employees to love the work they do. If workers are struggling to deal with overly-complex security policies and frameworks, they’re going to become overwhelmed and unmotivated to produce high-quality work.

SSO allows your employees to hit the ground running and stay secure in the process. Whether you’re running an organization that needs to hit specific deadlines regularly or you have access to thousands of sensitive documents, SSO allows you to maintain sanity while being protected.